It’s a common problem for big organizations: There are many business units spread nationally or internationally and they all need to communicate with a central office to get supplies and information. A Chinese company has come up with a mobile app designed to streamline that communication—and recently updated it to include free telephone calling, instant messaging and notifications that pop up on a recipient’s mobile phone.

Shenzhen Yiyun Cloud computing Co., Ltd., which provides companies with services designed to help them manage internal and external business communications, introduced in 2014 the app called Yidinghuo, which means “easy to order” in Chinese.

“Before, procurement personnel in many companies relied on traditional methods, including telephone and fax, to order products from their suppliers or headquarters,” Du Min, Yiyun’s marketing director, tells B2BeCommerceWorld.com. “Companies have thousands of products and may need to work with hundreds of buyers every day, but procurement efficiency is often very low and it is easy to make mistakes. Our app can help companies build their own online store to allow its workers on sales, finance and warehouse teams to work together with buyers via mobile devices.”

Here’s how Chinese restaurant chain Happy Taste uses the app to streamline order-taking from its 150 locations. Whereas previously Happy Taste employed a full-time employee to manually input the 100 orders it receives from its restaurants in a typical day, now affiliates send orders through the app and all order the processing is handled online. The restaurant chain says there are fewer mistakes and affiliates are happy because they can track their orders anytime via their smartphones. They can also use the app to check inventory, transfer payments and track shipping information.

More than 100,000 companies use the Yidinghuo app, most of them small-and mid-sized e-retailers, restaurant operators and retail chains, Du says. Yidinghuo also has several large clients, including the China division of Royal Dutch Shell plc, she says.

Yiyun in February introduced a new Yidinghuo option that incorporates features in the enterprise social app Dingding developed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., China’s largest operator of B2B and B2C online marketplaces.

Dingding is designed to facilitate communication between business partners and employees within a large organization by offering 1,000 minutes of free telephone calling per month, plus instant messaging, group chat, video conference calls, email and cloud-based document storage. Dingding also provides such workflow-automation features as reimbursement management and requests for time off. Alibaba is a licensed telecommunications carrier in China, which enables it to offer the wireless calling features.

“Working with Alibaba, we added Dingding into our app as a new communication feature,” Du says. “Procurement workers can talk to their suppliers on Dingding when they are placing orders. One of the best feature of Dingding is that users can send pop-up notification to recipients even when the recipients don’t have the app open on their phones. That enables users to send important messages to someone even if the recipient isn’t able to talk on the phone.”

She notes that many Chinese businesses already use Dingding, and she hopes incorporating it into Yidinghuo will bring it new clients.

Yiyun charges about $800 for a year for a company to use the basic version of Yidinghuo; the version with the Dingding feature costs about $1000.

The app is only available in China for now, but Du says that could change. “We are considering developing an international version of Yidonghuo in the future,” she says, “since I have received several inquiries from overseas companies.”

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